I’m tired of my artist friends fetishizing pre-web media, feeling that to matter they have to print a book, get published at a magazine, or get funded to film a cinema movie or start a “real” startup. Fuck that.
You know how those over 40 make fluffy pronouncements about new digital literacies?
Well, the new literacy is PUBLISHING: reaching hundreds, thousands, millions through web media, for next to nothing, and learning to hold their attention. It’s only tangentially a technical challenge.
End rant. I love you artist friends.
I believe the Google-China faceoff a momentous occasion. A major fallout between 2 of the very most powerful organizations on Earth.
So I created this
experimental summary to try to wrap my head around it. The idea is to aggregate all the developments of a major news story,
linking even more aggressively than Wikipedia and straight to
first sources as much as possible. The
favicon bullets are links to that paragraph’s source. All emphases mine.
Similar cover articles have been common for more than a decade now.
In computer magazines.
This is a women’s fashion magazine (!).
220 sites you’ve never heard of, devoted to makeup, fashion, beauty, style..
The jocks, the cheerleaders, the geeks—we’re all webheads now.
Harpoon, my GreaseMonkey script to download tweets is fixed (it broke with some minor changes from Twitter). You can also now download your (and your tweeps’) favorites, which are often substantial & valuable cullings (My friend @olifante has already ~2000 great pickings!).
Get it from its UserScripts page.
We were chatting. I was grasping for a great, recent quote that congealed my thoughts well but I couldn’t find it in my quote collection nor recall anything but the vaguest of phrasings.
What I remembered was that it was written by that
famous author who committed suicide, I googled that but that’s sadly too broad a description. So I kept thinking and I also remembered that he was famously very much a fan of that famous
swiss tennis player, whose name of course also evaded me. But googling was successful this time, retrieving not Martina Higgins, but ah, yes, Roger Federer. So now I google
“federer author suicide” and that finally got me David Foster Wallace. With the name it was a snap to find the quote in my collection, and all of it happened real-timely enough to keep the flow of the IM conversation.
This sort of thing has happened often to me and I’m sure it has to you: googling for vague recall, for completing your thoughts. Instead of closing your eyes and willing an unconscious mind racking you outsorce to Google the unconvering of the tip of your tongue. What stroke me this time was the chaining and the speed (just-in-time-thinking). What got me to write this down was that in a few years such a thing will be so unremarkable I’m sure we’ll wonder how it felt before, if those in transition ever noticed how their mind was being steadily extruded.
The quote?
TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb.
Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.
David Foster Wallace
I’m going to Lift France 09 tomorrow! Since a big part of my motivation for going was its focus on networking, since they encourage you to fill a profile on their site and over half of the >550 participants actually do it, and since the theme this year is “A hands on future”, I decided to do a quick re-interface their list of participants, which was too unwieldy for me.
Check it out at http://elzr.com/lift
Much improved! http://elzr.com/reader It’s really getting fun now! Now you can really read the whole magazine in a single page! Plus: columns, much better design (section separators!), and… flags!
It’s still a very early release
(the columning in particular will be much improved soon) so please be gentle and let me know what you think of all the changes. What do you like? What’s helpful? What would you like to see?
Note that there are some weird bugs in Safari, to be fixed later. And all bets are off on what will happen in IE, I don’t have a machine to try it in for the moment.
See the project’s history at
http://elzr.com/posts/reader-economist
The page is pretty heavy, ~250k, but it still loads up in in seconds. It’s still much less than
The Economist’s current front page, which overloaded as it is with flash ads, weighs a whopping 4MB!
Backbars on social link-sites is a GreaseMonkey script to
turn the headlines and comments of social link-sites into ambient bar charts (of votes/diggs/views/users…) It works on
Reddit,
Delicious,
Digg,
Hacker News, and
Stack Overflow (and
MetaFilter now!).
The idea is to give you subtle non-verbal clues to improve your browsing experience almost subconsciously. The backbars don’t replace the count they represent, what they do is convey you its magnitude unobtrusively, and, crucially, compare that magnitude to those around it. So you can now see, almost without thinking, that, say, some comment is popular, but that there’s a comment around that’s twice as popular.
Once you have it, just start browsing at your favorite social link-site:
Reddit,
Delicious,
Digg,
Hacker News, and
Stack Overflow.
It’s the first release but it’s very usable already, I hope.
I hope you enjoy and find it useful, please let me know what you think of it in the comments.
The present’s already hard to believe. It’s the most hopeful of times, the most dreadful of times.
On one hand,
the Pirate Party —a left/right-bloc-independent party pursuing “the reform of laws regarding copyright and patents, the right to privacy, both on the Internet and in everyday life, and the transparency of state administration.”WP— wins an astonishing 7.1% of Swedish votes and gets a seat in the European Parliament.
We’ve felt the wind blow in our sails. We’ve seen the polls prior to the election. But to stand here, today, and see the figures coming up on that screen… What do you want me to say? I’ll say anything.
On the other hand,
in less than a month, China will start forcing PC manufacturers to include censoring software
—ridiculously named Green Dam Youth Escort— on every computer’s hard drive.
It’s like downloading spyware onto your computer, but the government is the spy.
